When the world gets better, women reap the benefits. At least according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found women's cognitive abilities improve more from better living conditions than men's do. Many studies have confirmed that people get smarter when living conditions get better—but this is the first study of its kind that has found that when things improve, women benefit disproportionately. Boo ya?

Researchers analyzed data gathered in a survey of 13 different European countries in 2006. The survey asked 31,000 men and women born between 1923 and 1957 to complete various cognitive tasks, measuring memory, numeracy (number sense), and category fluency (quickly naming items in a certain category, like plants or animals). They then compared their results to what the world was like when a participant was 25—measuring factors like life expectancy, economic activity, and fertility rate.

As a whole, cognitive abilities improved with time, as conditions like health, education, and the economy were improving across Europe. But women saw a greater improvement than men. As time went on, women performed better than men at memory tasks and caught up to men in category fluency. Men still performed better than women at numeracy tasks, but the gender gap narrowed.

What's behind the gender differences? "We don't know why" women did better than men, Agneta Herlitz, the study's co-author, told The Verge. But she and her colleagues think some of it has to do with women starting at a lower place in society, so therefore they might get more out of general improvements, especially in education.

So will the future contain lots of smarty-pants women? It's unclear the trends will continue through the years, researchers told LiveScience. At this point, women simply may be "catching up," but if a boosted brain may be yet another benefit of feminism, that's pretty good news to us.